Beginner questions

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

On Mar 17, 2007, at 7:59 PM, Stefan Bruda wrote:

>>> o  Does MacPorts logs anything?
>>
>> nope (at least not currently).
>
> It is a pitty in my opinion,


	This feature is planned for a future release, its design still a bit 
up in the air and in the heads of some of us as 
still-in-need-of-implementation ideas.

> as is also the lack of a "pretend" flag
> (always nice for me to know in advance what is gonna happen).  These
> two are the main features I would personally like to have in the
> system.  Anyway, maybe I will become familiar enough with MacPorts to
> be able to contribute to the code, till then I will keep my mouth
> shut.


	I remember this being brought up at one time or another, but it's 
certainly a much more complicated feature and not many have put any 
implementation ideas forth. If you ever become interested enough in the 
project to get your hands dirty with our infrastructure, please do feel 
free to take a stab at it!

>>
>> Nope (although you could probably hack it in if you wanted). The
>> problem being that some ports won't compile correctly with certain
>> -j or CFLAG options.
>
> I am not that keen on it, though a logical solution would be to
> provide for a global value of these flags and then a way to override
> the values on a per-port basis.
>

	The ports.conf configuration file has a knob for environment variables 
you may want to keep during the build process:

# Extra environment variables to keep. Any variables listed here are 
added
# to the list of variables that are not removed from the environment 
used
# while processing ports
# extra_env                     KEEP_THIS THIS_TOO

	So maybe you can use some "magic" to stick what you want the build 
process to pick up in there (and I say "magic" 'cause MacPorts tries to 
sanitize the runtime environment by removing some potentially harmful 
variables, including CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS & LDFLAGS --thus letting the 
Portfile declare what it needs and not having anything interfere with 
it--, iirc, so I can't say offhand what the effect of including them 
there might be... I guess you're going to have to do some testing ;-)

	That being said, you can always override parts of the Portfile when 
calling port(1) on the command line, like:

port install <port> build.env="foo bar"

	If the Portfile for <port> includes its own values for the "build.env" 
key, what you supply on the command line will override it; therefore 
you should use that facility with some care, as it may break the build 
in unforeseen ways. But then again, if you come from Gentoo I'm sure 
the process of building software is nothing new to you, so I'm sure 
you'll easily figure your way around ;-)

	Hope that helps! Regards,...


-jmpp